I use Reva.CoSy as my diary&log and to store my
reference account IDs and passwords , etc , and my Shopping list .
It overcomes one of the fatal issues with K :
inability to copy and paste from other applications . Development
has been static for perhaps 2 years now , partially by the
diversion of a painful but addictive amount of time understanding
, which to me means expressing the essential mathematics in
executable array language starting with the simplest cases
in the classical
manner , the
physics of planetary temperature to battle the global statist
anti-CO2 fraud . Since you are somewhat familiar with K.Cosy
, you've motivated me to upload the K.Cosy
Job containing all my notes and computations concerning planetary
temperature to http://cosy.com/Science/K_CoSy_Warm.txt
.

I spent a good bit of the holiday , weighing moving the most
important ideas and algorithms from Reva.CoSy to Factor
, "an expressive, fast and full-featured Concatenative language invented by Slava Pestov" . Slava is a world brilliant guy
whose jEdit
I've been using since I started 4th.CoSy . His Google
TechTalk provides working solutions to issues of implementing
what Iverson would call adverbs which I am still wrestling
with . Factor is a language with wide ranging libraries ,
and a significant user community . By Thursday night , I had
tentatively decided to migrate .

By Sunday , I had decided that , however little time for , and slow
the rate of , making progress on 4th.CoSy , it`s worth
is on several grounds .

CoSy is built in a Forth built directly in
about 50kb Intel architecture code ; Factor is about 12k
lines of C . One of my goals is open and transparent code
down to the silicon .

The philosophical goal of CoSy , inherited from APL
, is maximally succinct notation with maximally coherent
vocabulary for the executable expression of algorithms . Factor
has a whole kitchen sink of "computer science" structures and
concepts , but no overriding , crystalline vocabulary ( object & applicative verbs ) . For instance , it has both
non-expandable "arrays" and extensible "sequences" . In
CoSy , all data objects are extensible "sequences"
, or lists . An example of the omissions arising
from the sink full of objects path of Factor is the
apparent lack of a verb returning the number of items in a
sequence . It's one of the essential words you look for in an APL
.

4th.CoSy is inheriting K's very simple K-tree
structure where all objects are rows of 3 item lists of symbols
, values , and attributes . Not coming from an APL
background , such a coherent list based structure is not in Factor's
ken .

Factor is content with the postfix syntax
intrinsic to concatenative languages . I seek the visual
simplicity which comes with APL's infix which
allows verbs themselves to delimit lists . Thus

While I could translate my modulo indexed lists of lists
augmenting Factor's classes , in the same amount of time , I
can make major advances on a much leaner but more coherent Reva.CoSy
. None the less , there is a lot to learn from
Pestov's Factor .

You've added to my motivation to perhaps over christmas make time to
do some of the minimal vocabulary enhancements which may truly wake
up my current Reva.CoSy into a dynamic , workspace
like environment . Thanks .

I played a little
with the APL version and K version, and worked up to the Reva
version. It crashes pretty frequently on me (XP, SP3), so I
didn't get very far.

Thanks, Andy

Hi Andy ,I'm curious how you
happened on my work> Comment from user:> Hi Bob,> I downloaded the
FORTH version but it's very rough.That's kind . Various
things have kept me from making much progress on itin recent months .> I'd like to have a
look at the old APL version.It's been a loong time
since I last looked at the original flat APLversion and took a
while til I realized the only place to access it is intheYahoofiles . But , it seems the files in
CoSy2000.EXE still run underXP .I've made you a member
to give you access .The last K version is
available athttp://cosy.com/K/CoSy/membs/. I stilluse the K version for
all my accounting .> Best regards, Andy
WarrenSometime soon I'll
reorganize access to the old work . It's prettyinaccessible currently
.Thanks for your
interest .--Bob
Armstrong--www.CoSy.com--719-337-2733--